needed: map with boundaries and points

Additionally, I need to limit my map to just one county and immediate
environs (the shapefile shows all municipal boundaries in the whole
state). thanx, --Gary

Ok, you have 3 ways of displaying a polygon: its border only, a filled
polygon only, or a filled polygon plus its barrier (default display). If
you display a point or a line over a polygon, you will see the point
and the polygon underneath. If you display several layers of polygon and
want to see every polygons in every layers, you would have to draw only
the border (except for the bottom layer, of course). Usually a right
click on the layer name + "display properties" would allow you to change
the way the polygons are displayed (read your GIS manual).

Remember that you change the order of the layers (which one is on top,
the 2nd etc), usually by dragging the layer name up or down in the list
of layers.


I am not too familiar with the open source GIS... so read the manual to
find out if it is possible/how to do it, but you basically have 2 options:
1) make a query (usually an SQL query) on your layer, selecting only the
entries being in your county. You may do this by querying an attribute
of your polygons, if you have any. Otherwise, you may do it by a spatial
query, selecting all the polygons (municipalities) that lay under the
polygon of your county. This option is more professional than the next one.

2) by hand, select your polygons... copy and paste in a new shapefile.
Otherwise, inverse the selection (so you get all polygon but the ones
you want) and delete them from your file!

Good luck in your project!
Jean

Well, I've made a great deal of progress toward the goal: I have a
raster map of the County overlaid with both county and municipal
boundaries in gvSIG... it looks good. Of course the point is to plot
locations on it, and there's the rub. I've cleaned up all the
addresses and geocoded them at batchgeocode.com, and used the
resulting csv file to produce a layer as you suggested, Jean (by the
way, to make the csv import filter work, you actually have to delimit
your fields with semicolons... it's a European thing, I guess). I've
also used another free tool (MapWindow GIS) to produce a shapefile
from that data.

The problem is, in both cases, that the resulting points end up in
South America or somewhere, so to speak. The latitude & longitude
coordinates are interpreted as (I think) meters, so something like
42.0000/-73.5000 is represented as 0.0004/-79.5000. There is some
functionality to do transformations when adding a shapefile layer, but
I'm not savvy enough with the various reference systems &/or the
software doesn't support the operation I need.

So the long and the short of it is, all the data from
nygis,state.ny.us plays nice together, but I can't integrate geocoded
lat/long data.

I'd appreciate any illumination you could provide, --Gary